


A Heart, Sketched in Blue Pen

by ClawR



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Mother-Son Relationship, POV Female Character, What Kind of Day Has It Been
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-15
Updated: 2013-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-04 17:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1083508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClawR/pseuds/ClawR
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like his father and his sister before him, Josh Lyman can't help but break his mother's heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Heart, Sketched in Blue Pen

**Author's Note:**

> Originally this story was part of a sort of high-concept thing I was working on, a collection of scenes and vignettes that happened as a direct or indirect result of the events of the shooting at Rosslyn. I finished four of the eight I'd planned, but the more I looked it over, the more I realized that this one was the only one that really mattered.

It’s  almost eight, and Avi’s just settled into her easy chair with a glass of merlot to watch _Survivor_ , when the phone rings. She eyes the phone, sitting in its cradle across the room, and sighs and gets up. One of these days, she’s going to move the phone to within arm’s reach of the chair. One of these days, definitely.

“Hello?” she says. If it’s a telemarketer, she’s going to throw something.

“Mrs. Lyman?” says a vaguely familiar voice. Given a minute or two, Avi knows she could place it.

“This is she.”

“Mrs. Lyman, this is C.J. Cregg, the White House press secretary. I work with your son, Josh.”

 _That’s_ it, of course. Avi’s heard her voice in a thousand or so twenty-second soundbytes as she channel-surfs past MSNBC. She didn’t recognize it immediately because there’s something off about it, like maybe C.J. just woke up, or has a touch of laryngitis. “Ms. Cregg, ofcourse—“

C.J. cuts her off. “Have you been watching the news, Mrs. Lyman?”

Avi’s fingers tighten around the phone. Her heart is trying to crawl out her throat. She knows, she just _knows_. “No.”

“Tonight, as the President was leaving a town hall forum, someone opened fired into the crowd. One of the bullets hit Josh in the chest.”

Avi keeps a notepad by the phone to take down messages. She’d been doodling on it earlier that day while the cable company kept her on hold. Right in the center of the page is a heart, sketched in blue pen, lopsided, with one lobe twice the size of the other. She’d started to shade it, darker on the edges and lighter in the center; halfway through, her call had been taken off hold, and she’d stopped drawing.

The yellow light of the lamp glints on the hard, deep lines of the ink.

Somewhere in the house, a clock is ticking.

She can smell her vanilla-scented hand lotion.

One of Avi’s bare feet is warm and sweaty on the hardwood floor. The other is nestled, dry and deep and scratchy, in the shag rug the phone table stands on.

The mellow aftertaste of her merlot lingers in her mouth.

Avi could live to be a thousand years old and never forget this moment.

“Is he dead?” she says, her voice low and foreign-sounding.

“He’s in surgery. It’s critical. Mrs. Lyman—” C.J. coughs, or maybe she’s covering a sob or a sigh. “Mrs. Lyman, if you can get here in the next twelve hours, you should.”

“You’re in D.C.?”

“He’s at George Washington University Hospital. I’ll make sure your name is on the list.”

Avi hangs up and calls United Airways. She books a ticket on the next open flight to D.C. and calls a cab to take her to the airport at 5 a.m. the next morning.

“No luggage,” the cab driver says when she tells him to go to the airport. “Short trip?”

“Maybe,” Avi says.

*

She has to turn her cell phone off when she gets on the plane. For an hour and a half, she stares out the window at the clouds and the lakes and the tiny little cars, and she dreads turning it back on. They’d never give her the news in a voice mail, but she’d be able to tell, even from a message telling her to call back, just by the tone of voice. She’d be able to tell. Even after thirty years, she’s never forgotten what it sounds like when someone tells you your child is dead.

*

“He just woke up,” Leo McGarry says when she walks into the waiting room.  No niceties here. He doesn’t say hi. He doesn’t ask her how her flight was. He doesn’t even say her name, although he’s known it for forty years.

“Thank you,” she says.

*

There were moments, during Noah’s illness, before the sudden end, when it had seemed the game was up, when what family there was had gathered to witness his last days, to bring each other lukewarm cafeteria pizza and rub each other’s shoulders in the dimly lit waiting room, to take turns standing watch over him in his bed, intimidatingly and obviously sick, the beeping of the heart monitors daring them to make any noise at all, his hands yellow and bent on the patchwork quilt they’d spread over his lap in a futile attempt to make the room more homey.

It’s not like that, this time. Hospitals are always awful, silent, and sterile, but there is a world of difference between a death bed and a sick bed. Josh’s visitors—and there are many—talk without wincing. They laugh without crying. They bring books, blankets, and music, but they also bring files and folders, memos and newspapers. Future things.

That’s not the only thing that’s different. After Noah’s death and Joanie’s, Avi had felt like the world was ending, and she’d been angry when the 5 o’clock news reported on a drought in the Midwest, or the bank teller wished her a nice day, or the couple next to her in line at the grocery store gossiped about their neighbors. It burned her to realize that the world hadn’t noticed its own demise.

Well, the world is noticing this time. The first bouquet of flowers shows up ten minutes after she arrives. Fifteen more arrive within the hour. The hospital gift shop takes its phone off the line and stops taking orders, but they _still_ show up, hundreds of them, and they don’t stop for weeks. Cards, too, and stuffed animals. Josh’s assistant, Donna, sorts through all of the letters from well-wishers every morning, selecting a few for Josh to actually read. Avi becomes popular in the oncology and pediatrics wings, where she’s taken to distributing the excess gifts.

There’s other mail—awful mail—and after she hands the third “that bullet should’ve killed you” letter over to the Secret Service, Avi’s had enough. She wanders into Josh’s room, casual.

It’s been three days since Josh woke up, and already he looks miles and miles better. Some of that will go away once they start to wean him off the painkillers, she knows, but for now it’s nothing short of miraculous. He’s sitting up in bed, watching C-SPAN while reading…

“Is that a physics textbook?” Avi says, dropping into the bedside seat.

“Sam brought it,” Josh says. He closes the book. “He started out college as a physics major.”

“Why’d he switch?”

“Turns out he’s bad at physics.”

“And why did he bring you the book?”

“He brought me every book, actually. He brought me every book in his apartment.”

Josh points to the other side of his bed, and Avi leans over to get a look at a small tower of books stacked on the floor.

“That was…kind of him,” she says.

“Yeah, well, I think he thought it was the least he could do, since the madmen who run this hospital won’t let me go back to work for three _months_.”

Avi knows her son, so she knows that he knows perfectly well why it’s going to be a while before he’s cleared for work. She knows that he knows that he was shot, that he almost died, and that the physical therapy alone is going to consume him. She also knows that this is a bad time to bring up her concern. But she’s a mother, and timing be damned—she just can’t sit on this.

She stands, wanders over to Sam’s stack of books, and idly picks up the one on top. _Casenote Legal Briefs: Constitutional Law_. “What if you didn’t go back to work?” she says.

“There’s a certain attraction to that, but after a while I might get tired of sleeping under the bridge and panhandling for grocery money in the parking lot.”

“Josh…”

“And it’s gotta be easier to brag to your friends about your son who works for the President than your son the hobo.”

Avi sets the book down. “Josh, I’m your mother. It will never be hard for me to brag about you.”

Josh twists the thin hospital blanket in his hands and looks away. “Mom, I’m going back. You know I’m going back, and I know you don’t want me to, which is reasonable, I guess, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m going back. So can we skip this conversation?”

He leans back into his pillows, runs his good hand through his hair. Avi sits on the edge of the bed, pushes Josh’s hand aside, and rubs his forehead with her thumb, like she used to do when he was a little boy, sick at home with the flu.

“I spent a full day in labor with you, you know,” she says. “You were already two weeks late, and Joanie was just bursting with impatience for her new little brother. Noah said that he had to give her about three tons of ice cream to distract her from running into the delivery room.”

Josh laughs. Avi smiles and moves her hand to cup his face. She’s never told him this. By the time he was old enough to hear about it, Joanie had just died, and it seemed cruel.

“I guess I felt pretty much the same way,” she says. “I’d been waiting for you for a long time. See, I had three miscarriages between your sister and you.”

“Mom.” Josh puts his hand over hers. She’s never heard his voice like this; so soft, so careful. She’s hurting him, she’s _hurting_ him—how can she be hurting her child, who’s already been hurt so much? “I’m sorry.”

 _Sorry you went through that_ , he’s saying. _Sorry I’m going back to work in the cross-hairs, as soon as the cross-hairs will have me_. _Sorry I lived when your other four children died_. _Maybe one of them would have been the type to stay safe at home_.

“You’re my _miracle_ , Josh,” she says, and the pale green hospital sheets grow dark where her tears hit them.


End file.
